RCMRD Hosts Kenya’s Lands CS and US State Department Official

This week, RCMRD hosted Kenya’s Lands and Physical Planning Cabinet Secretary Hon. Farida Karoney on Tuesday and Ms. Homa Hassan from the US State Department and USAID Foreign Assistance Office (F) on Wednesday.

During her visit to the Regional Center for Mapping Resources for Development (RCMRD), she was accompanied by the Principal Secretary Dr. Nicholas Muraguri and the Chief Administrative Secretary Hon. Gideon Mungaro Lands and other senior officials.

The Cabinet Secretary was impressed by the work that RCMRD is doing for the 20 member States and beyond. She urged for more engagement with stakeholders and the general public to create awareness on the services that RCMRD carries out.

She said her visit was aimed at enabling her understand the opportunities for partnership with the Centre and especially Geographical Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing and other fields of natural resource management and mapping.

Speaking during her familiarization tour at the Centre’s headquarters in Nairobi, she said the Government has given and will continue giving support to RCMRD to ensure it delivers on its mandate to the region.

She divulged that 18 out of targeted 61 land registries are already partially digitalized. She said her ministry would embrace teamwork and engage stakeholders in the ongoing exercise which kicked off in 2014. Hon. Karoney said the government is keen on abolishing manual procedures for services that can be obtained online as it endeavors to improve the service delivery to public. She added that digitisation will eradicate massive land teething challenges, among them double plot allocation, Land manipulation, cartels, land rates payment problems since all land transaction will easily be monitored online. Land digitalization, she said, is set be completed by 2020.

RCMRD’s Director General Dr. Emmanuel Nkurunziza encouraged greater utilization of RCMRD services by the Government and also appealed for facilitation for implementation of the recently approved Centre redevelopment master plan. (The Centre has sent a request for proposals from interested contractors at http://rcmrd.org/tenders)

HOMA HASSAN Listening to presentation by RCMRD, FEWSNET and ICPAC 3

In her visit to RCMRD, Homa Hassan the Country Coordinator, Office of U.S. Foreign Assistance listened to a presentation on USAID’s support to RCMRD’s work on Kenya’s county level hazard atlases. The delegation was also able to learn about this work directly from the technical experts as well as the end users and clients on how these tools have supported decision making through stressors such as droughts and floods. She visited RCMRD’s Remote Sensing Lab and the Data office.

RCRMD, ICPAC, and FEWS Net further demonstrated how the USAID supported work at RCMRD has helped support clients and governments with timely and accurate information on issues such as forest fires. In this session, another team in from Washington, a climate change and conflict assessment team were also present. Ms. Hassan works on USAID budget issues for the region.